I loaded up my fork and took my first mouthful, a mouthful of this taste from my childhood.

I was completely unprepared for it.

So many associations. Too many, each following hard on the heels of the one before. Cooking with Mum while Dad was at work. Plucking out the apple cubes with my little kid fingers and sucking on them, throwing rice to the floor. Mum showing me how to put the sultanas on my teeth like a pirate, how to swoosh the watery sauce around our plates as the sea, shoving apple cubes under the bubble-wrap skins of the chicken drumstick boats as they sailed off over the ocean . . .

I forced it in, that curry, laden with too many memories and too much cream. It was hard for me to swallow. Bette and Hessel hadn’t noticed. And when finally Bette stood, stacking plates, busy-busy, I stood too.

‘Thank you, Grandma,’ I said. ‘Thank you for a lovely dinner. I’ll say goodnight now –’ My throat became too tight to go on and I stepped back quickly and shut the bedroom door behind me.

And I sat on the bed and finally pulled the brown paper package out of my bag and held it in my hands.

23

Dr Honeycott had been my doctor for as long as I could remember. He’d given me my tetanus boosters, stitched up my knee, caught my appendicitis early, made a home visit when I called him because my mother was away and my father was sick – pneumonia, it turned out. His clinic was the first place I went when the test came out positive. Because I trusted him.

I went straight to him for help. And it shouldn’t have been that hard – it should have been straightforward and easy and quick because I’d caught it early, really early by my calculations, not even a missed period. It should have just been a hiccup – no emotional complications, no need to make a big deal about it or turn my life upside-down or tell anyone else. This wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be solved. Just something between me and my doctor. But when I seated myself in the chair by his desk and folded my hands and said with a sheepish laugh, ‘So, I appear to be pregnant, and I would very much like not to be,’ he’d only returned my levity with a surprised blink and a hard look. A taste of things to come.

‘We’ll need to do another one of those,’ he said humourlessly – I was holding the positive test from the shopping centre toilets. He handed me a clear plastic specimen jar. ‘You know where the toilet is.’

‘Should have saved my money and my wee,’ I’d joked. But he didn’t even smile.

When I returned from the toilet he dipped a thin strip in the jar and laid it on the lid to wait.

‘So not an intentional pregnancy then?’

‘Ah, no.’